WWALS Watershed Coalition advocates for conservation and stewardship of the Withlacoochee, Willacoochee, Alapaha, Little, and Suwannee River watersheds in south Georgia and north Florida through education, awareness, environmental monitoring, and citizen activities.

Commissioner Fried presented the resolution to Lisa Rinaman, the St.
Johns Riverkeeper and Chair of
Waterkeepers Florida.
Read the
resolution declaring April as Water Conservation Month here.

“On behalf of Waterkeepers Florida, we thank Commissioner
Fried, Governor DeSantis and the Florida Cabinet for designating
April as Water Conservation Month. Water conservation is critical to
the work we do to protect and restore Florida’s waters. We applaud
this resolution and the Cabinet’s commitment to conserving Florida’s
waters and the opportunity to partner with our leaders to protect
our waters for future generations,” said Lisa Rinaman, St.
Johns Riverkeeper.

FPL’s planned-for-a-decade pipeline to the sea just happens to connect
Sabal Trail with an LNG export port. Nevermind that this MR-RV Lateral
was never run through the FERC permitting process: FERC rolled it into
Florida Southeast Connection.

FPL is seeking state approval for a 32-mile natural gas pipeline to
provide an uninterrupted supply to Florida Power & Light Co.’s
new Riviera Beach plant.

Map: Palm Beach Post, 31 March 2012.

The story said FPL was working with FDEP to determine the final route.
It also said:

The project is not related to FPL’s proposed $1.5 billion, 300-mile
natural gas pipeline that would have run from Bradford County to
Martin County. The Florida Public Service Commission Continue reading →

Solar in Florida is not just for Duke and FPL anymore:
Tampa Electric is building 260 megawatt hours of solar power, and
the Florida PSC and Office of Public Counsel are praising it for reducing
coal and natural gas burning.
Even FPSC, which approved the Sabal Trail fracked methane pipeline boondoggle
only five years ago, is starting to look up and see the sun in the Sunshine State.

As we’ve seen so often in the Sabal Trail docket,
Spectra seems to be acting in place of FERC,
responding yesterday to thousands of comments
on FERC’s certificate rulemaking.

Spectra’s bottom line: a pipeline company’s bottom line matters more
than the Fifth Amendment due process, or water, air, or safety.
See page 25:

Contrary to some commenters’ arguments, the Commission’s public
interest determinations are not rendered insufficient under the
Fifth Amendment public use requirement because the Commission
considers precedent agreements among applicants and affiliates to be
evidence of public benefits.

Spectra repeatedly argues that
FERC does not have authority to consider hardly anything other than
whether the pipeline company has customers, yet FERC has authority to give eminent domain to private corporations and to let them gouge through our lands and under our rivers without local agreement or payment first.

In this election year, you can ask every candidate for statehouse
or Congress whether they support Continue reading →

What is FPL hiding in
all that confidential and redacted material
in a 117-page petition for approval of
folding FPL’s Martin-Riviera Pipeline into Sabal Trail’s downstream
Florida Southeast Connection (FSC)?
This has been planned at least two years.
on the excuse of lower rates for customers.
Yet FPL redacted what FSC would charge and future cost projections,
so FPL’s customers and the rest of the public
affected by these unnecessary pipelines have no way of knowing
what they would cost, and emergency responders can’t see what’s
on this pipeline.

Desperately seeking loopholes, at 4:58 PM today on a Friday,
Sabal Trail claimed “Applicants would face irreparable financial harm,”
which is pretty rich for the company that stuck the Bell Brothers with
$47,000 in Sabal Trail legal fees
for fighting eminent domain from that same FERC certificate
the DC Circuit Court is likely to void next week.

It wants to “avoid the irreparable impacts of a system shutdown,”
says the company that destroyed world-record-holding
soybean farmer Randy Dowdy’s soybean fields.
As Randy Dowdy said last May, and Sabal Trail’s own reports then say
they have done nothing to correct:

“We’ve got loss of production for the future that will take
not my lifetime, Continue reading →

FERC, if it follows its own rules, should reject the DSEIS, stop Sabal Trail, and revoke its permit, says a motion filed today with FERC by Suwannee Riverkeeper.

Followup blog posts will feature major sections and arguments from these 20 pages with their 93 footnotes.
The basic arguments are summarized on the first page:

WWALS argues that no SEIS can be complete without accounting for GHG
from Liquid Natural Gas (“LNG”) exports, nor without
comparing natural gas to solar power, according to precedents
already set by FPL, FERC, and others, which also reopen the whole
basis of the FERC 2016 Order.

FERC may not care, but the D.C. Circuit Court may, or candidates
for office, or the voting public.

FPL admits Florida needs no new electricity, so why should Sabal Trail get eminent domain?

Hahira, GA, September 6th 2016 — Two Georgia brothers are stuck with
paying almost ten times as much in Sabal Trail’s legal fees as they spent
defending their property against that invading fracked methane pipeline,
even though FPL apparently admitted this year that all three of its 2013
excuses for that pipeline are no longer valid. Two federal agencies and
numerous state agencies issued permits based on those excuses. Sabal
Trail used those permits to get eminent domain, including to drill under
rivers in Florida, Georgia, and Alabama and through the fragile limestone
containing our drinking water in the Floridan Aquifer. It is time for
this unnecessary, destructive, and hazardous boondoggle to be shut down
and its $3 billion in FPL ratepayer money to be used for solar power in
the Sunshine State.

"First and foremost, this is a multi-billion dollar company that is
for profit. In my personal opinion I don’t see how a private for-profit
company should be allowed eminent domain. I don’t understand that. That
makes no sense to me. I might could understand it if it was for the
greater good of the country but this is not. And it is certainly not
the federal government or the state government building some road or
highway."